“They each had something on the other.”
“I’m sure he was happy to have this coke fiend do his dirty work, as long as he could keep the violent stuff from getting out of control. So they were going at her, sometimes both at once. And now she’s just answering by rote: ‘I do not plead guilty to espionage or conspiracy. I never expressed dissatisfaction with the Soviet Union.’ She must have fallen asleep chanting this stuff. Next thing she knows, she’s being woken up with a kick to her kidney. Her chair’s on the floor. She’s being punched and hit in the side. She’s on the floor with those damn lamps aimed at her, and all she can see is the Hayseed’s black boot. So what does she do? She starts shouting, ‘Terrorists! You can’t beat me! This isn’t 1937. You can’t extract false confessions with beatings!’
“So now the other one—he’s in the room too—he steps in and says: ‘Too bad you’re not in the hands of the Gestapo, you kike bitch. You know what they’d do to you? They knew how to handle traitors.’
“And she says to him, ‘Are you comparing yourselves with the Gestapo? Is that where you learned your methods? How unpleasant it would be for you if your superiors heard you proudly modeling yourselves after the fascists.’?”
“Hold on,” I said. “She said that, to them?”
“I don’t think she knew what she was saying. It was just impulse. But that was it. The next day, they gave her a document to sign. All the espionage charges were dropped. Neither of those guys apparently wanted the investigation to go on a day longer. They wanted her shipped off before she ended up in the hands of another investigator, or before one of them ratted on the other. That Gestapo comment—it spooked them enough that they wrapped things up quick.”
I rubbed my forehead. I was feeling achy and feverish from the lack of sleep. The balcony height was making me queasy. “Why didn’t she tell me this?” I said. “Frankly, I would have been impressed.”
“Well…once you uncork the bottle…you start talking about one thing, and before you know it a lot of other stuff starts coming out. You weren’t the easiest guy to tell stories to.”
“What do you mean by that?”
“I don’t want to overstep. I don’t know what it was between you two.”
“Say what you were going to say.”
“Your mother thought you had a lot of…virtue.”
“Me.”
“Yes. You were always very uncompromising.”
I couldn’t believe this. I had to laugh—to regain my sense of myself. “She thought I was the idealist?”
“She knew you didn’t just listen. You’d try to catch her on inconsistencies. That’s just how your mind turned.”
“Julian Brink, the purist,” I said.
“Look, you probe enough in anyone’s history and you’re bound to reach some less-than-sublime conclusions. It was hard enough for her that you had paid the price for so many of her choices.”
This I had not been expecting. But before I could answer, Sidney said, “It’s late. For you and me both. I don’t want to talk myself hoarse.”
“Of course. Thanks for talking to me, Uncle Sid.”
“When you’re done shaking your tail for the fat men over there, you come pay me a visit.”
“I will. Good night.”
I waited for him to hang up and set down my phone.
—
I FINISHED CLEARING THE PAPERS, still under the spell of the scene Sidney had narrated. My mother’s brazenness. The audacity of such an accusation. There had been a certain shrewdness in it, however inadvertent. She had done to her interrogators what they were attempting to do to her: pry open their allegiances, divide and conquer. Even in that near-perfect darkness, she’d felt around and found a chink.
I put the papers on the nightstand and set the alarm for seven. And then I tried to get some sleep.
I slept fitfully and woke up to icy air slicing in between the folds of my comforter. The room was completely dark aside for a seam of daylight cutting in between the heavy hotel curtains. I could hear the air conditioner going full-blast. I had no memory of turning down the thermostat, which I felt sure was possessed by demons.
I’d been having a dream, and the temperature offered an explanation. The setting was an unspecified polar region. The dream itself had had the grainy quality of an old cinema reel, a war film out of my childhood. There was a ship, setting sail down a channel. It looked like the cruiser Aurora, but I knew that beneath this historic cover it was one of my own ships, because of the specific pattern with which it cut through ice. In the dream I was steering, but also watching myself steer. And though there were no others, at least that I could see, I felt enveloped in an aura of approval from my crew, full of my somber contribution to the heroic effort—a feeling of virtue that I was enjoying very much until I cared to look down at the helm, and found upon the polished wooden wheel not my own hands but a pair of fat paws covered in tattoo ink. From here on the dream became a scene from the Titanic. Recklessly, and possibly deliberately, the tattooed hands piloted my Aurora right into an invisible iceberg that materialized out of the night. I could hear a scraping, a slicing of metal skin, which continued in dream time until, auspiciously enough, tufts of stuffing began falling out of the hull and dropped at my feet like cotton snow.